Suicide: A Way Out For Students

I. Introduction

How does society affect the way students view life? What role does society play in the way students value their economic, human, social, and cultural capital? This idea of suicide being caused by societal pressures is an important topic to know about because it can help many suicides be avoided.

II. Methodology

Instead of just researching suicides theories, I decided to look up different articles about what was being done to prevent suicides from happening in the first place. By doing this, I could back track to see how solutions could be tied to different causes that make students consider suicide as a way out. My hypothesis was that race and economic standing was what played the biggest role in a students consideration of suicide. I thought that race was one factor because of the restraints put on students of different racial backgrounds. I also considered a students economic standing because without a monetary form of motivation to help push him/her forward, he/she might feel as though they're working towards an unattainable goal. It would be like the idea of "upward mobility" was at a halt based on how much economic capital they had.

III. Findings

As explained by Dixon, Heppner, and Anderson, suicide is the "inability to cope with the myriad of demands, problems, and hassles." (1991). A study conducted by Robert Aseltine and Robert DeMartino found that "lower rates of suicide attempts and greater knowledge and more adaptive attitudes about depression and suicide were observed among students in the intervention group. The modest changes in knowledge and attitudes partially explained the beneficial effects." ( 2004: 446). The intervention group being referred to in the above quote was put together as a part of a suicide prevention program. This program was put in place to examine the " Signs of Suicide (SOS) prevention program in reducing suicidal behavior." 2100 randomly selected high school students participated in this experimental study. Each of the 2100 students came from 5 different schools and were split into health classes. They were then broken up into treatment groups and control groups and were then asked to fill out a questionnaire. Based on the data collected from the questionnaires, black students had lower reported suicide ideation and suicide attempts than white although whites had a greater knowledge of depression and suicide.

The information gathered from this experiment could have had the outcome in which it did because of the places where the sample came from as well as the amount of people used. The conclusion made by the conductors of the experiment will not be uniform throughout all high schools but I believe that the SOS prevention program was a good way to determine which students might need help in the suicide prevention field after tragic accidents based solely on the numbers produced in this experiment. Those students with higher suicide-ideation rates would need the most help.

"College is a difficult and vulnerable period for young adults as they begin to separate psychologically from parents, and at the same time strive to maintain attachment and interdependence with them." (Hoffman, 1984: Holmbeck & Wandrei, 1993). There is also the theory that students commit suicide because of a loss of social belonging or poor college adjustment. The purpose of the research conducted by Buelow, Schreiber, and Range was to "investigate the relationships between attachment, reasons for living, and suicide risk among college students," and their hypothesis was that those with insecure attachments would be more prone to having suicidal thoughts an behaviors . "With poor attachment as a foundation , students may be less able to adjust to these interpersonal changes, and instead they may become depressed and even potentially suicidal." (Henton, 1980).

163 undergraduate students voluntarily participated in the research experiment and were also asked to complete a questionnaire. All of the students remained anonymous. They completed three questionnaires and demographic questions. African Americans were recorded as having a mean score of 4.40 indicating mild